How bad are the Lakers? This season is shaping up as the worst in L.A.

March 22, 2014

Updated July 6, 2016 7:14 p.m.

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Lakers' Pau Gasol gazes outward as Chris Kaman looks on during the 4th quarter during a game against the Rockets at Staples Center on Wednesday evening. Lakers lost with the score of 108 to 134. ED CRISOSTOMO, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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NOW The Los Angeles Lakers' Pau Gasol and Kent Bazemore sit on the bench during their recent history making loss to the Clippers at Staples Center. KEVIN SULLIVAN, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

THEN Gail Goodrich of the Los Angeles Lakers has trouble getting the ball off as he jumps between Doug Collins (20) and Billy Cunningham of the 76ers in the first half of NBA game on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 1975 in Philadelphia. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Stan Love (34) of the Los Angeles Lakers gets Steve Mix's arm out of the way as he gets a jump shot off in the first half of NBA game with the 76ers, Wednesday, Jan. 9, 1975, in Philadelphia. Lakers won, 106-98. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Some of the Los Angeles Lakers bench, Jordan Farmar, Jodie Meeks, Shawne Williams, Jordan Hill and Xavier Henry prepare to take the floor in the second half at Staples Center Tuesday night. The Lakers beat the Clippers 116 to 103. MICHAEL GOULDING, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Lakers' Pau Gasol gazes outward as Chris Kaman looks on during the 4th quarter during a game against the Rockets at Staples Center on Wednesday evening. Lakers lost with the score of 108 to 134. ED CRISOSTOMO, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Hollywood hates a flop. This is a city that craves winners, and for every bus bringing in a new batch of starry-eyed hopefuls to Los Angeles, there is one hauling away the rejects.

Want to be seen? What better way than a front-row seat to the biggest show in town. A golden statuette is the kind of currency required to observe up close the Los Angeles Lakers, the real men in gold.

Don’t get left out. No one comes to L.A. be a loser. Losers are quickly forgotten.

Perhaps that is why, after suppertime has passed in Savannah, Ga., a 69-year-old pastor answers the telephone and is quick to apologize. Any memories of the year in question have vanished.

Details are fed to him. It was 1974-75. Players had names such as Corky, Kermit and Zelmo. Gail Goodrich was still there. Aging veterans populated a locker room with youngsters hoping to hop on the coattails of victories not so long gone.

The Lakers finished 30-52 and in last place.

“I was sort of baffled as to why we didn’t win,” Russell said, images of the season beginning to stir. “I didn’t realize we only won 30 games that year.”

Thirty-nine years later, it remains the worst season in the Los Angeles history of the Lakers, wedged between the retirement of Jerry West in October and the arrival of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar eight months later. Soon came Jerry Buss and Magic Johnson, and then 10 crisp championship banners.

Russell, who signed as a free agent that summer, is told that his team’s dubious record will likely be broken by a new generation of lousy Lakers. It’s a team that, like 39 years ago, relied on an aging and broken superstar and was ultimately let down.

The last reason anyone might care to remember the lost Lakers of 1974-75 should soon be erased.

***

As the Forum began to fill on Sept. 27, 1974, Jerry West prepared for his first game since suffering a groin injury that cost him 51 games the season before.

At 36, he spent the summer training with the UCLA track team and running sprints up the sharp-sloped 17th hole at Bel Air Country Club. Like Kobe Bryant after tearing his Achilles’ tendon four decades later, West was hellbent on proving he could come back from the debilitating injury.

Just two years earlier the Lakers won their first championship in Los Angeles, but Wilt Chamberlain retired in 1973 and West was now on an island as one of few holdovers from that era.

As he sat at his locker in the Forum at the start of his 15th season, West realized there was one thing for which the sprints could not prepare him. He looked down at his hands. They were completely dry.

That’s when he knew.

For as long as he could remember his hands dripped with sweat before games. He went on to score 19 points against the Portland Trail Blazers, but said he was missing a certain electrical charge.

“People say exhibition games are not significant,” said West, now an executive with the Golden State Warriors. “But every game to me was significant.”

Afterward, he accepted compliments from teammates and coaches. He waited an unusually long time to change out of his uniform, then showered. He told trainer Frank O’Neill that he wished to speak with General Manager Pete Newell and Coach Bill Sharman.

At a news conference six days later, West retired.

***

Stu Lantz sat courtside in early March as a handful of Lakers warmed up for their game three hours later against the New Orleans Pelicans. The team’s television analyst, Lantz has had a unique view of the team headed for history.

Only recently did he realize that the team he makes a living critiquing was on the verge of breaking a record set by the one he was traded to on Dec. 6, 1974.

“Somebody on the (production) crew was talking about the worst record … and how many wins can this team get?” Lantz said. “Then they said the team in ’74-75 only had 30, and I’m thinking, ‘Damn, that was us.’”

After losing 117-107 to the Washington Wizards on Friday night, the Lakers (22-46) need to win eight of their final 14 games just to match the 1974-75 team’s mark. The season has been disjointed and hijacked by injuries. After Bryant spent the offseason in intense “blackout” workouts, the superstar played in six games before suffering a broken bone in his knee that will cost him the rest of the season.

At one point, the Lakers’ first four choices at point guard were all injured. Kendall Marshall, Kent Bazemore and MarShon Brooks have all taken on major roles. None was a Laker at the beginning of the season.

Lantz argues that in a 17-team NBA in 1974 – before expansion diluted the talent pool – it was tougher to win games than now. Still, he was incredulous.

“You look at that roster that we had,” Lantz said, “you think, ‘Holy (expletive), how did we only win 30 games?’”

Even without West, the Lakers sported future Hall of Famers in Goodrich, who scored 44 points in one game that season, and a past-his-prime Connie Hawkins. Russell was an All-Star two years earlier with the Warriors and Zelmo Beaty an ABA legend. The year prior, Elmore Smith set an NBA record with 17 blocks in a game.

Kermit Washington, a reserve forward in 1974 who now works for the Players’ Association, trundled down the steps into the arena, waved to guard Jodie Meeks and settled into a seat near Lantz.

“Don’t look at the individuals,” Washington said. “It wasn’t a good team.”

Hawkins, 32, was a year away from retiring. Big men Beaty and Happy Hairston, the two members of that team who have since died, were past the prime of their careers. Lucius Allen could score.

Allen, 27, was a former UCLA star acquired early in the season in exchange for Jim Price – an All-Star that season in Milwaukee – and finished second on the team in points behind Goodrich.

Although he won the 1971 championship alongside Oscar Robertson and Abdul-Jabbar in Milwaukee, Allen was never asked to lead.

“Everybody was going for themselves,” Washington said. “It wasn’t a team effort. It was bad.”

“Is there any correlation to now?” Lantz asked. “This is the same thing. You’ve got a bunch of guys on one-year deals and they’re all looking for their future. They’re playing for next year.”

***

Days after West retired, in an exhibition game against Seattle, the highly regarded Russell tore ligaments in his knee when SuperSonics point guard Slick Watts took out his legs from behind.

“I just signed with the Lakers, really looking forward to it, and bang! I’m out,” said Russell, who coached until 2009, but now focuses on his work as an associate pastor at the Immanuel Baptist Church in Savannah, Ga.

The scrambling Lakers pulled off three trades in the first two months of the season, acquiring Corky Calhoun from Phoenix, in addition to the deals for Allen and Lantz.

“You know what happens with these teams,” said former UCLA star Lynn Shackelford, then Chick Hearn’s partner on the radio and TV simulcast, “losing begets losing. You start going downhill and then you panic and you make trades. No one knows anyone else. It just gets lost and it gets worse.”

The offense was so limited that when Lantz arrived at his first practice and began to study the playbook, Washington told him not to bother.

The Lakers ran just two plays: Goodrich off a pick and Allen, who replaced West, off a pick. The guards would come up the floor, the guards would shoot.

“That’s all we had,” Washington said.

It worked well for Lantz. Hours after being traded, he scored 26 points against Atlanta.

Meanwhile, Sharman, who died last fall, was not the presence he once was. In the early stages of losing his voice permanently due to vocal cord damage, Sharman whispered, and coached at practice with a megaphone. The Lakers lacked a leader on the floor for the first time in the Hall of Famer’s tenure, and some players thought he had a difficult time adjusting.

“I think he was a guy that really required leadership to come from the floor,” Calhoun said.

Now an oil executive in the Washington, D.C., area, Calhoun later won a championship in 1977 with the Trail Blazers. He pointed out that Sharman was used to having West, Chamberlain and Elgin Baylor on the floor.

“He was just kind of directing and would set back and let them do their thing,” Calhoun said. “The team we had was disconnected parts. There was no cohesive team playing.”

The Lakers lost their 42nd game, ensuring a losing season, on March 3 in Atlanta.

Around that time Shackelford corralled Hawkins for a postgame interview. Hawkins’ spent the first eight years of his professional career blackballed by the NBA due to allegations of point shaving in college. He bounced around the ABL and ABA and was a Harlem Globetrotter for four years.

Hawkins had no great loyalty to the NBA, and was more a favorite of teammates and fans than coaches. Fellow Lakers said he was as likely to ask out of practice with a small injury – and go play tennis – as participate.

“So,” Shackelford remembers asking Hawkins, “how are the Lakers going to do the rest of the year?”

Hawkins responded, “We’ll finish the season.”

***

The bench was anchored by Washington, Lantz and Riley. Stan Love was a seldom-used big man who could shoot – a lesser version of the player his son, Kevin Love, would become a star at UCLA and in Minnesota.

But Riley was the anchor of the unit, as much as the team had one at all.

“Pat Riley, of course, had the gift of gab,” Allen said, “and he was Mr. Suave. We liked to be with Pat on the road, because he always lit up the party whatever it was.”

Riley sported floppy hair and a thick mustache and was the one player, Allen said, who related to the black players as easily as the whites. It was a role that 10 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act could not be overvalued.

“We’re getting our butts kicked and we’re all pros,” Allen said. “We know we should be better. When we’re down there and we’re having our team meeting and it’s getting hot and personal, you needed a guy like Pat.”

Many players’ relationships with Riley faded, just as his light Kentucky drawl eventually did. He became the coach of the “Showtime” Lakers before moving on to New York and Miami, where he serves as the behind-the-scenes architect of the two-time defending champion Heat.

At the end of March, Calhoun will be in Miami for a conference. Riley is slated to be the keynote speaker.

“I remember him as a teammate with the Lakers,” Calhoun said. “Now all the success he’s had as an executive and in basketball, can hardly believe he’s the same guy.”

***

Washington believes the Lakers did not rediscover leadership until West returned to the organization as the head coach in 1976-77.

“Leadership starts at the top,” Lantz added.

That was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s second season with the Lakers after being acquired on June 16, 1975. Players knew the superstar center’s arrival meant change, whether progress for the team or a reduced role for themselves.

“Kareem makes all the difference in the world,” said Allen, who played with Abdul-Jabbar at UCLA and in Milwaukee.

The Lakers were back on top relatively quickly, winning five titles from 1980-88. But in the modern world of a restrictive Collective Bargaining Agreement, luxury taxes and superstars joining forces, the days of 1975 provide little of a blueprint for current Lakers’ management.

“Kareem showed up,” Washington said. “Who is going to show up here to be the savior here? Dwight Howard left. You don’t have any free agents coming out this year who could come out and change anything.”

But the current Lakers have one more thing in common with the team that, for now, holds the distinction of being the worst ever: They will finish the season.

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